Chasing Zero In The Emerald City

Nearly four years ago, Bill de Blasio began his first term as Mayor of New York City.  One of his first major acts was to implement Vision Zero, a project with the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities.  It began in Sweden two decades ago and, since then, most European nations, as well as Canada, Japan and other countries, have adopted it.  So have a number of US cites besides New York.

One such city is Seattle.  The stated goal of the Emerald City is zero fatalities by 2030.  Casualties have certainly decreased since its implementation, but questions remain as to how much this reduction has to do with the program itself or the demographics of the city.

by Gabriel Campanario, The Seattle Times

To its credit, Seattle has achieved decreases in traffic casualties, particularly among pedestrians and cyclists, even though it is the fastest-growing large city in the nation.  It has among the largest percentages of commuters who cycle or walk to work among large cities, though those percentages have remained unchanged since 2012 and had changed little for several years before it. It should be noted, however, that mass transit usage has increased at a faster pace than the population growth, in part because of changes to bus routes and new light-rail stations in key locations.

It's also interesting to compare Seattle's statistics with those of other comparably-sized cities.  In 2016, the number of police-reported traffic collisions increased to 11,603 from 10,930 in 2015.  That followed a decade of steady decreases in both the number of collisions (15,744 in 2005) and the collision rate per traffic volume (79.4 to 55.5 from 2005 to 2015).  The 2016 collisions resulted in more serious injuries than those in 2015, but in 20 fatalities, compared to 21 in 2015.  In all, five pedestrians and three cyclists were killed in 2016:  both numbers were down by one from the previous year.  

(It should also be noted that 23 percent of the 2015 fatalities occurred in just one crash on the Aurora Bridge.)

While one fatality is too many, I think it's fair to let Seattle take some pride in its numbers.  While it witnessed a total of eight fatalities among cyclists and pedestrians, in Nashville, with roughly the same number of people, 50 cyclists and pedestrians died in traffic crashes.  Meanwhile, Washington DC and Portland OR, with slightly fewer people than Seattle, had 26 and 13 such deaths, respectively.  And, in the same year, my hometown of New York, which has about twelve times the population, recorded 162 deaths (18 cyclists and 144 pedestrians).

Will any city or country ever reach "zero"?  If so, which will be first?  If not, which will come closest?

Quicker In Queensland: Bicycle Ambulances

Police departments have long known that some "beats" can be more effectively patrolled by bicycle than in motor vehicles.  Such places include downtown areas, housing complexes, college campuses and almost any place where tourists and pedestrians congregate.  In such places, narrow streets or paths are difficult to navigate, or simply inaccessible, for motor vehicles, so an officer on two wheels can arrive more quickly than one who is behind a wheel.

Less common are ambulance bicycle fleets.  I am guessing it's because the idea so rarely occurs to anyone who decides on such things:  My searches have not yielded any reports of any city or other jurisdiction trying it and deciding it was a bust.

However, I have found out that in the Queensland, Australia city of Gold Coast, bicycle ambulances have been responding to calls in the Surfers Paradise and Broad Beach tourist zones.  The program is seen as so successful that the nearby city of Brisbane is launching a similar service. 

Gold Coast Bicycle Response Team

 

Officials hope that the Gold Coast and Brisbane paramedics on bikes will help to ease the extra burdens that will no doubt be placed on local emergency services when the 2018 Commonwealth Games are held in Gold Coast.  One sign that this is possible, and that the benefits of paramedics on bikes could extend well beyond the games, is that the average response time for a cycling paramedic has been, on average, eight minutes faster than that of an ambulance in a motor vehicle, according to Jane McDonald, one of the paramedics.  She recounts, as an example, a bicycle response team arriving four minutes after an anaphylaxis patient making a call.

Ms. McDonald herself might have something to do with those times:  After all, she raced and was considered one of her country's elite female cyclists.

How A Stolen Bike Became The Gift That Gave Back

By now you know that I have a soft spot for people who, in whatever ways, bring bikes to kids who couldn't otherwise afford them.

Most of the stories I've posted so far are about individuals or organizations who restore old bikes that might otherwise have ended up in a landfill.   Some started out as one-person operations and mushroomed into local non-profit organizations.

Well, today I'm going to tell you about a kid who gave his bike to another kid, and whose family helped out that other kid's family at the holidays.  And there's a particularly interesting "twist" to this story.

Fifty years ago, on Christmas Eve 1967, 18-year-old William Lynn Weaver was walking around in his neighborhood, the Mechanicsville area of Knoxville, Tennessee.  He saw another boy gliding down the street on a bike.  "Boy, that looks like my brother's bike," he thought.

When he got home, he asked his younger brother Wayne whether he knew where his bicycle was.  "It's down on the steps," he replied.  Except that it wasn't.

William Lynn Weaver with his brother in 1963.

Well, Mr. Weaver tracked down the kid who took his brother's bike--to an unlit shack in an alley--and planned to confront the kid.  But his father, who accompanied him, told him,"Just shut up and let me talk."

He knocked on the door.  An elderly man answered.  Inside, the shack was cold and dark, with only a single candle for light.  It turned out that the thief was indeed the old man's grandson.

He and William took the bike and walked home.

The father told the mother, who was cutting a turkey, about the incident.  She said nothing, but packed up some of the food.  Then "my father went to the coal yard and got a bag of coal," William recalls.  Then his father looked at his brother and said, "You've got another bike, don't you?"  The brother nodded, and the three of them returned to the shack with the food, coal and bike.  

The father handed over $20--not an inconsiderable sum in those days--and said, "Merry Christmas."  The man broke down in tears.

William Lynn Weaver today.

As William explains, his family wasn't as badly-off as the boy and man who lived in the shack, but they didn't have much, either.  "My father was a chauffeur, and my mother was a domestic," he explained.  "That Christmas, I don't remember what gift I got, but I do know that [giving to the boy and his grandfather] made me feel better than any Christmas I've ever had."

Ah, the power of a bike...